Biography

Luigi Sergi was born in Presicce (LE) in 1952; he lives and works in Novara. His Salento origins deeply mark his artistic production through the broad and diffused light that reflects the sunny landscape of the South, the colors of his land, and the pigments that have settled in his work, never in a passively figurative way. Indeed, as Lionello Mandorino (Maglie 1976) points out: “In Sergi, broad brushstrokes and warm colors characterize the constant movement and inspirational lyricism of the work permeated by figurative essentialism.”

Sergi began his artistic activity in 1970, the period of his first solo exhibition, dedicating himself simultaneously to painting and sculpture and attending the Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts in Lecce, where he graduated in sculpture in 1975.

After completing his studies, he moved to Rome where he remained until 1978. In the capital, he began research on modularity and the psychology of form, deepening his path also through confrontation with some artists, approaching in particular the works of Rocco Coronese and Corrado Cagli. Sergi’s art was defined not only through these encounters but also thanks to the personal reworking of various artistic movements: Cubism, Abstractionism, Informal Art, Pop Art, Conceptualism, up to the Optical experience.

After the Roman interlude, he settled in the province of Novara and took on the position of teacher of Artistic Subjects, continuing his technical-pictorial experimentation and overcoming the canonical boundaries of the work, letting real space enter the painting and the painting into real space. Thus: "…the simple horizontal and vertical limits of the pictorial plane have become a sort of pure environment evocative of the memory of remembrance and then of simple emotion; a sort of lunar landscape vibrated by lights and shadows, formally related to one of the phases of Corrado Cagli…" (Marco Rosci, Orta San Giulio 1983).

In 1980 he moved permanently to Novara where he met almost immediately the critic Giovanni Quaglino with whom he would establish a deep relationship of friendship. It was the critic who followed him in his career and encouraged him to exhibit the works related to the research conducted in the last five years of work. In 1982 he exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions that testify to a mature acquisition of artistic experiences and, at the same time, a way of painting based on intuition, on an almost physical relationship with the canvas, was increasingly defined.

In 1983, for the Municipality of Borgoticino, he created a large pictorial-decorative panel in the atrium of the middle school, through which one can grasp the artist’s return to his figurative past interpreted with an interweaving of chromatic gradations. At the same time, Sergi also directed his attention towards a new cognitive path: the poetics of the “package” (pacco), a metaphor for life as a mystery, enigma, or surprise that, perhaps, is worth not revealing. The poetics of the package-artwork offers food for thought on the difficulty of interpreting reality and on the need to direct it, penetrating it, through forms that are not immediately decodable.

In 1998 Sergi built real packages that were often also shipped, and as the artist himself explains: "…the package hides a work, but it could also be a simple empty container, that is, a work of art itself: whoever owns it must decide whether to keep it as it arrived or open it, discovering the content, of whose existence, however, he is not certain. If it were missing, the owner would have nullified the object, led by his curiosity into an unprecedented gamble, where creation-illusion-destruction follow one another with inevitable necessity. The gesture becomes risk: revelation of something hidden or irreversible annihilation, joyful discovery or bitter surprise. And the package almost takes on the connotations of a metaphor for many moments of our existence: attractive when they are still hidden in the future, often disappointing when they are lived."

In 2003 the international magazine “Italiaimballaggio” dedicated the cover of the month of June to him on the theme of the package. In 1990 he opened his studio in Via Zanoia to visitors for the first time, with the exhibition “Aggregazioni” (Aggregations), and the following year the Municipality of Presicce organized a large anthological exhibition for him in the former Convent of the Carmelites, while in 1997 together with the Prospettive Association it awarded him the “City of Presicce Prize” for the merits achieved in the artistic field in over twenty years of activity. His paintings propose a surreal note “that hovers and dominates the diversified spaces in their setting and in the coloristic poetics that governs them and transmutes into particular rhythms and refinements, to become sky, matter, dream, freedom, and stylistic purity” (Giuseppe Vese, Lecce 1988).

But: “the geometric joints, colored overlaps in shades never faded nor impetuous… are amalgamated with cunning and precision, so much so that it does not take much to remain amazed observing the canvases even for the first time” (Fabrizio Morea, Orta 1983). The artist, using acrylic and enamel, fuses them integrating them organically to make them instruments of construction of an astral art, a leap towards freedom and the dream that acquires visibility through pink and light blue. As Giovanni Quaglino wrote in 1982: “the aggregations of primordial matter, the chaos rich in enigmas and potential for development find order in the artist’s poetic intuition… the tumult of matter finds a brake, a superior balance in the geometric scanning of the backgrounds, in the rhythmic alternation of chiaroscuro, in the harmonic aggregation of color.”

In 1988 the Municipality of Lecce organized the exhibition “Onirismo e realtà nell’arte di Luigi Sergi” (Oneirism and reality in the art of Luigi Sergi) curated by Giuseppe Vese and on this occasion Sergi proposed large-scale works to the public: "…many works, often large, often multidimensional, connect sidereal mysteries, landscapes of volumes, completeness of forms, connection with the real and all in perfect harmony, according to modules well outlined by a crescendo of alternating forms visualized through perspective incidences…" (Giuseppe Vese, Lecce 1988).

In the elaboration of these works the artist: "…rejects the figurative (or worse illustrative) function of the painting: the objects, the figural traces, which survive in his paintings, are always decontextualized, projected into a purely symbolic dimension, in which they lose their obvious semantics to assume an evocative meaning… in these illusionistically manipulated surfaces one grasps the ambiguity of a way of making painting that, while tending to the zero degree of pure effects of light and color, goes in search of a new semantic status… for Sergi art… becomes an expression of tension and material and spiritual drives from which the artist cannot pull himself out through a detached and purely aesthetic vision" (Giovanni Quaglino).

Sergi’s works always presuppose an attentive spectator, ready to go beyond what is immediately readable, to grasp the complexity of signs, images, and contexts wrapped in a dimension that is almost dreamlike but, at the same time, more real than ever, represented through an increasingly evolved and incisive technicality that allows the artist’s sensitivity to interpret even the most intimate and hidden reality. From reality, not only what is most intimate in the soul emerges, but it also represents what is to be broken down, to go further and release freedom, opening the window. And it is precisely the theme of the window, a metaphor for the courage to dare by pushing the gaze beyond a banal horizon, that was interpreted in 1999 in Gravellona Lomellina, when commissioned by the municipality Sergi created a sculpture on the theme. The expressive research passes through the constant theme of the sphere, a body without beginning or end, full of symbolic meanings.

It is Stefano Pistochini in 1996 who grasps and emphasizes this aspect: “the sphere is an element loaded with that representative dynamism, considered in that function of exploratory order which is notoriously the existential revelation of man to himself and continuous osmosis between internal and external.”

Still on this theme, Massimiliano Cesari in 2003, in the presentation of the exhibition organized by the municipality of Gagliano del Capo (Le), “Emozioni nei colori” (Emotions in colors), wrote: “the spheres that swarm give the works sculptural dynamism, thus indulging the author’s “whims”. It is no coincidence, in fact, that the favorite shape is precisely the sphere: the solid that best represents the perfection of the cosmos, a shape that does not allow any anchorage with daily reality, as it is freed from any possibility of tactile concretization of its own surface.”

The sphere represents a sort of eye that allows a game of glances between the spectator and the work. Sergi has never stopped since the 80s reflecting on the debate between apparent form and the objective, on a different way of seeing what is inside and what is outside of us. This way of penetrating reality takes concrete form through polychrome pictosculptures and the introduction of relief in the painting, which allows the artist to enhance space to the point of defining multiple spatial planes that intersect. Marco Rosci (Novara 1986) defined his work: "…love of scenic “surprise”, of the fantastically articulated space of the theatrical machine".

His works, many of which belong to museums, public bodies, and private collections, are appreciated for the constant and personal artistic research. An indefatigable artist (also for the commitment lavished in numerous solo and group exhibitions), Luigi Sergi opened a space of his new studio to the public, “Dentro l’Arte” (Inside Art), inaugurated in 2007 with the catalog exhibition “Espressioni”, a synthesis of his over twenty years of activity. The space also houses the headquarters of the cultural association “De Arte” which organizes exhibitions, cultural and artistic events.

Other Critical Notes

"…The compositions insert themselves into a dynamic that develops and grows in an unexpected layout. Probably, in the author’s intention, he wants to highlight the fact that signs and things intertwine and develop and grow with the growth of existential dynamics, both of the individual and of society."

Pierangelo Negri - 1984

"… Sergi sets the autonomy of the pictorial space as a sort of vital field, of self-sufficient structure, of space governed and scanned by parameters, entablatures, “fields”, surfaces endowed with chromatic vitality and their own static and dynamic laws…"

Marco Rosci - 1984

"… different spatial levels express in their symbolic and metaphorical findings the call of ancestral moods and fantasies, of memories and fabulations of rituals and popular mythologies felt over the years and in the handing down of symbolisms… Luigi Sergi possesses the uncommon gift of infusing his icons with a diffused naturalness that makes their forms clear and therefore lovable but at the same time obscures their origins, keeps their path secret…"

Carlo Franza - 1991

"…The sculptures are composed of different parts, often distinguished from one another by different chromatic backgrounds. The color can spread with flat and uniform tones and frequent is the recourse to the geometric shape, which impresses a precise rigor on the composition; but any tension towards a too rational clarity is regularly dampened by the presence of other elements. Of a totally different mold are in fact the direct interventions, which Sergi’s hand leaves in some parts, in which the personal sign of fantastic imagination is more easily readable…"

Francesca Pensa - 1995

"….fragments of ordinary everyday life, humanizes and gives meaning to the banality of our days with a proactive, constructive tension, aimed at opening new conceptual gaps, new mental passages to plan, with men of good will, possible utopias. With his works Sergi reminds us that what makes art a universal and eternal language is its intrinsic awareness of wanting to overcome the limits of the unknown, of the unknown, with the sole force of sensitivity and the warmth of feeling and to offer a hope of infinity where science can only offer the cold concreteness of events, the objectivity of reality and desperate immanence".

Giovanni Cordero - 2007

"…played entirely on the eye and therefore on perception, Luigi Sergi’s works propose themselves as mysterious and mystical imprints of great rigor and complexity, at the limit - sometimes - of metaphor.

Toti Carpentieri - 2008

Works in Public Spaces

• Turin - Automobile Museum “Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia” - 2001 work “Copri cerchio” (Wheel Cover)
• Santa Maria di Leuca (LE) - Museum - Vito Mele - 2004 work
• Ruffano (LE) - Contemporary Art Pinacotheque - 1998 work
• Brindisi - Museo Presente - 2003/04 work “Vicendevolmente: si amano l’un l’altro” (Mutually: they love each other)
• Acquarica del Capo (LE) - Christ the King Church Atrium - 2011 work
• Gagliano del Capo (LE) - Council Hall - 2005 work “La partenza” (The Departure)
• Gagliano del Capo (LE) - Municipal Library - 1984 work
• Borgoticino (NO) - Middle School Entrance - decorative panel 1981 work
• Gravellona Lomellina (PV) - 1999 work “Finestra” (Window) installed on the wall of the old Enel cabin
• Milan - Italiaimballaggio - cover of June 2003 “Pacco: Anna Magnani”
• Lecce - cover of the book “Oggi e il mio domani” (Today and my tomorrow) by author Antonia Occhilupo titled “Il sogno” (The Dream) - 2007 work